Anonymous Sender wrote:
>
> Buy new 80G drive, install as slave, set up same number of partitions
> as on old drive just proportionally bigger except for /dev/hda1 which
> I kept the same size (10 cyl). mounted new partitions. So far so good.
>
> Began copying from old partition to new partition using
> dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hdb1
> dd if=/dev/hda3 of=/dev/hdb2
> dd if=/dev/hda5 of=/dev/hdb3
> dd if=/dev/hda7 of=/dev/hdb4
> and then things started to go horribly wrong. Started getting numerous
> messages about 'ext-fserror ext_readdir bad entry in directory' all
> pointing to the same inode. System won't respond so switched the
> machine off with the Off switch.

When you started copying whole partitions with dd, you were copying them
byte for byte including the filesystem metadata. IOW, your filesystems
on the new disk are now the same size as the ones on the old disk. Your
larger partitions won't have access to the extra space. Moreover, since
you state that you mounted the new partitions, I presume you had already
created filesystems on them, which were overwritten with the smaller
filesystems from the older drives. Then when you shutdown with the
power button, things were probably in a wildly inconsistent state. Who
knows what happened with the partitions on /dev/hdb.


> Another good question - what =should= my migration process be?

See the "Hard Disk Upgrade HOWTO" at http://www.tldp.org/